by Andy Brudtkuhl on November 17, 2009
I had some inside info that Rackspace would be announcing this and it’s significant for many reasons. First off this is all powered by JungleDisk – software Rackspace purchased that created automatic backups to cloud storage systems – including competitor’s Amazon S3.
Another reason this is big news is that it totally legitimizes cloud backup and storage for Small to Medium size businesses (SMB’s) which is something Amazon has yet to be able to do within its web services division.
So what does it do and how much does it cost?
- Store and share files between other employees and/or team members
- Synchronize folders across one or more computers
- Use Rackspace Team Sync to ensure that team members are always working with the most recent version of a file
- Set up automatic backups of your data to the Rackspace Cloud and easily restore that data in the event of a hardware failure
- Secure your data with built-in AES-256 encryption, using a key controlled by the user
At only $4 per user per month this is a great solution and alternative to tedious onsite backups and network sharing. We’re going to try it out at 48Web and let you know how it works but we think this is going to be a great tool to add to our internet business arsenal.
They are also introducing a server backup solution that seems like a win/win for IT people. As someone who used to manage a network of web servers I know backup is a pain in the ass to manage and monitor. This alleviates most of those issues by having it automagically pushed to the cloud.
Rackspace Server Backup enables you to automatically backup your Windows or Linux based server data to the cloud. Chances are, if you have a server in your closet, you also have backups running on that server already, most likely with a tape backup. Every few days or couple of weeks you have to go into the server closet and switch out the old tape for a new tape. Sound familiar? It can be a painful, manual process.
Say Hello to Rackspace Cloud Drive & Rackspace Server Backup
by Andy Brudtkuhl on May 22, 2009
In the wake of Google’s downtime we have decided at 48Web to develop a Cloud Disaster Recovery Plan for our business. Once completed we’ll be providing it to anyone interested in using it to model their own disaster recovery plan for “the cloud”.
What’s a disaster recovery plan for? In the event something bad happens – ie: servers go down – a disaster recovery plan is a set of processes that you have at hand to address the situation without hesitation. Generally these are reserved for larger companies or data centers. But as a small business whose entire IT infrastructure lives in the cloud – we thought it necessary to have a plan in place.
Here are the problems at hand and potential solutions. We want to use this blog post to crowd source ideas and conversations around cloud disaster recovery to better develop our outline and plan. Please, chime in!
Communications
Our entire communications infrastructure is in the cloud. We use Skype and Google Talk for voice communications. We use Google Apps to host our email. Down the list we also use Twitter, FriendFeed, and our blog for communication to clients and prospects.
If Google Apps goes down (as it did last week) and we are unable to receive email our new process is to write a blog post alerting our community that we are unable to receive email. This will be sent out to our email newsletter subscribers and customers (via aWeber). We’ll also send out a tweet from our personal and company accounts. We’ll be using our pre-defined content outposts and distribution system to communicate the message.
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by Andy Brudtkuhl on May 19, 2009
OffiSync is a plug-in for Microsoft Office 2003/2007 that integrates the office suite with Google Docs. You can open documents, spreadsheets and presentations already saved in Google Docs, edit them in Microsoft Office and save the files in Google Docs. The add-on creates a new revision of the document when you save it, but there’s no option to automatically save the document periodically.
Note: Despite its name, OffiSync doesn’t actually sync Google Docs with your computer and it doesn’t even show the most current version of a document, assuming that other people edited it after you opened the document in Microsoft Office.
by Andy Brudtkuhl on May 14, 2009
When you’ve come to rely on a service like Skynet err Google it becomes a big problem when their entire infrastructure goes down. For a small company like mine we have become completely reliant on “the cloud” using affordable web services to run our company.
Today, Google is having problems. We can’t receive email – both personal or company – because it’s run on Google’s GMail. We have AdSense running on some of our sites – which are timing out – and is causing many of our websites to load improperly. Our main research and information gathering tool – Google Reader – is unavailable. Custom Search that we have built in to some of our sites is failing. Oh – and that search tool we use about 2,000 times a day is extremely slow and unusable.
If “the cloud” is truly the Holy Grail of IT systems architecture we cannot have problems like these. If the enterprise is to adopt such services and really take the cloud mainstream we have to get over this hump. Who cares about Twitter uptime when a service like Google is down – affecting business systems all over the world.
Hopefully it was just a hiccup – but as businesses move further into the cloud, disaster recovery operations and processes still need to be in place. Even though you may have offloaded many of the risks and costs associated with operating your own IT department – you still need a plan in case the cloud fails.
by Andy Brudtkuhl on October 27, 2008
Today, Microsoft jumped on the “cloud computing” bandwagon with its announcement of Windwos Azure – “a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform.”
Aside from buzz words and tech speak, what does this actually mean? Basically it gives Microsoft application developers a solution to host and manage their websites in a “cloud” environment – meaning a scalable, managed environment that makes development and deployment easier. For us web developers (yes, we build our products with ASP.Net), it is supposed to help us to quickly and easily create, deploy, manage, and distribute our applications and services. At 48Web, we are in the process of ramping up our first product launch and will likely be using Windows Azure for our infrastructure.
This is BIG news following the recent announcement by Amazon to support Windows hosting in it’s cloud product – Amazon EC2.
From the announcement:
The Azure™ Services Platform is an internet-scale cloud computing and
services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers. The Azure Services
Platform provides a range of functionality to build applications that
span from consumer web to enterprise scenarios and includes a cloud
operating system and a set of developer services. Fully interoperable
through the support of industry standards and web protocols such as
REST and SOAP, you can use the Azure services individually or together,
either to build new applications or to extend existing ones.
Update: Although they have a big “Try It Now” button on the front of the Azure informational pages – there is no way to register and all the download links are dead. Fail…
Update: Also I wanted to note that I don’t see actual prices, but they claim it is based on consumption and is “attractive with the market”.
